Linux and RISC-V by 2030
2026-04-01 19:48 UTC
Replies (14)
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@commander@lemmy.world 2026-04-01 22:32
It shouldn’t be hard by 2030 I imagine; particularly if you primarily or exclusively use open source software. The RVA23 chips announced I usually see people comment them as having synthetic benchmark scores at about the Apple M1 level. I regularly use a laptop with a Skylake dual core in it and a Raspberry Pi 5 run off a microsd rather than a m.2 NVME hat. With that in mind, if RISC-V designs don’t get any better than that in the next 4 years, they’ll still be better than hardware that I will still be using. I still use a Raspberry Pi 3. At work every now and then I’ll throw a gitlab runner on a 10 year old desktop to have another thing building when things are busy There are RISC-V developer boards today with PCI-E slots that you can throw in pretty much any AMD graphics card. The big distributions Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Red Hat - they all support risc-v. felix86 is equivalent to box64 and FEX for x86 to ARM: felix86.com/felix86-26-04/ Software support is solid already today. It’s hardware availability for the announced RVA23 designs that’s not mature yet. 4 more years and I imagine in most cases the experience of Linux on RISC-V hardware not being much different than on ARM or x86 hardware
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@Eggymatrix@sh.itjust.works 2026-04-01 20:06
Why does your question sound like you are prompting an LLM? I sincerily hope we are not transitioning to communicating like this, because if I have to read stuff like this once again I think I will have to get offline indefinitly. To answer your question only Nostradamus can chew whatever you are asking mate, I think that thinking about what computer produced in two years you should buy in 4 years might be a cool video idea for an upcoming youtube channel, but absolutely useless for anything practical today.
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@HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 2026-04-01 21:58
"2030? So still a long time awa-holy shit that's four years from now" I feel old
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@SrMono@feddit.org 2026-04-01 21:02
I'm still checking on videos on youtube where people use currently available boards/laptops and test and compare them to ARMs. In my opinion planning 2027-2030 hardware purchases and a full commitment is still too early. There will most- ikely be a lot of movement be it chip-wise and with linux support.
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@OatPotato@hexbear.net 2026-04-01 20:09
If it can help you, Phoronix made some benchmarks last year to compare a RISC-V motherboard to Raspberry Pi : https://www.phoronix.com/review/sifive-hifive-premier-p550. I think 2027/2028 would be too soon to expect a good RISC-V "daily driver" (in terms of performance and support) because it takes time for an architecture to evolve but I hope I'm wrong.
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@non_burglar@lemmy.world 2026-04-02 02:13
I'm not gonna say "don't do it", but I've dug into this deeply and I've turned away from RISC V. RISC V is slowly being pidgeon-holed into embedded systems. This is not a bad thing, the embedded market (cars, tvs, industrial controls) is huge and diverse. RISC V has had a very rough start to introduction into bridge-and-bus systems the way we know from Intel/amd because there have simply been too many iterations of CPU registers and capability flags for integrators to take the platform seriously enough to commit to piling a bunch of effort to design, produce, and lead sales on any RISC V platform. Even arm (especially v9) has settled some of these platform issues and is ahead of RISC V in adoption in the integrated platform space (as opposed to embedded). Long story long, it is extremely difficult to write device drivers for RISC V because one would have to write half a dozen architecture versions, just for a niche platform that barely sells. Conversely, an embedded controller for, say, a vehicle gets a preliminary build and few revisions, ongoing support isn't part of planning the same way.
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@daggermoon@piefed.world 2026-04-02 09:15
I would love to be able to build a Risc V PC. This is currently impossible is it not? The only Risc V machine I've seen for sale is a Raspberry Pi like thing.
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@vikingtons@lemmy.world 2026-04-01 19:58
compat wise I think many packages are now available for rv specifically or as .noarch. perf wise, I think we're still a ways off, we're not seeing rv SoCs at the same level of perf / efficiency as arm, and whilst that's just a matter of time, I'm not sure you'll have many compelling offerings even a couple years from now, though potentially in 2030? you can check in with experiences using devices like the PineTab V or even the custom RV mainboard for the Framework 13. There are also several SoCs produced by SiFive on SBCs, some are card sized, some are mATX. These are primarily positioned as development devices, but they may give you some idea of what things are like right now
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@emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works 2026-04-02 02:43
As non_burglar said, RISC-V is so far mostly used for small chips for embedded systems. This could change in the future, of course, but you might not have a *good* RISC-V laptop by 2027-28. There is also a concern that the chips themselves need not be open-source, but there have been open-source designs such as XiangShan, which is comparable to A76. Currently, your options are DeepComputing's DC-ROMA, which uses a SpacemiT SoC K1, and Framework's Laptop 13, which has a StarFive JH7110. Neither CPU is fully open. On the software side, there is better news. Debian has accepted RISC-V as one of its main architectures.
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@non_burglar@lemmy.world 2026-04-02 02:15
Man, I'm trying to soften on AI, but this post is just awful.
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@digital_descartes@lemmy.ml 2026-04-02 20:33
What do you mean?
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@digital_descartes@lemmy.ml 2026-04-03 08:11
Okay now I understand, thank you for explanation :)
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@SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 2026-04-03 02:16
In theory probably yes, in practice from what I've heard ARM has some CISC-style instructions — presumably exactly because they offer performance increases.
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@zarenki@lemmy.ml 2026-04-03 09:52
RISC-V is designed to be an extensible instruction set, where the base is very minimal and reduced but a plethora of extensions exist. The ISA can be small for academic and microcontroller uses, large (more than a hundred extensions) for server uses, or anything in between. Despite the name, a powerful RISC-V server can arguably not be considered "RISC", though that term doesn't have a single agreed-upon meaning and some design characteristics strongly associated with RISC still apply such as limiting memory access to dedicated load/store instructions only rather than allowing computation instructions to operate on memory. Also, not everything is CPU instructions. Acceleration for media codecs, for example, normally means off-loading those tasks to the GPU rather than the CPU. Even if the CPU and GPU are both part of the same SoC, that doesn't touch the CPU instruction set.